On March 26, Love Day minus 5, three battalions of the 77th Division landed in the Kerama Islands, 15 miles west of southern Okinawa. The small Japanese garrison, numbering about five hundred troops, was quickly overpowered. The hilly islands of this little archipelago offered no terrain suitable for airfields, but a semienclosed interior waterway ran north to south between its largest island (Tokashiki) and five smaller islands to the west. This “Kerama Roadstead” would function as an advanced fleet anchorage, large enough to accommodate about seventy-five large ships in depths of twenty to
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